RITES AND RITUALS OF KASHMIRI BRAHMINS

Rituals can be described as established patterns of religious activity embedded in the cultural consciousness of a people, seeking to link the mundane or natural reality with the divine or transnatural. Although scholars all over the world have evinced a marked interest in the study of Hindu, and in particular Vedic, ritual in the recent years, viewing it from different perspectives, there has been hardly any focus on the ritual behavior of Kashmiri Brahmins, or Kashmiri Pandits as they are more commonly  known, as a separate area of scholastic inquiry. This is perhaps because the fundamental core of their rites and rituals is much the same as that of the ritual system prevailing among Hindus in other parts of the country. At the same time, with regional factors or deshachara coming into play, a whole body of new accountrements has grown around this core over the centuries which can be characterized as distinctly Kashmiri.